Tuesday, March 27, 2018

I am Maggie, one of the new grad students in the field. I am
in my third year of graduate school and have come to the field to collect some
of the data I need. I arrived in Kenya in early March with Connie and Allie,
and unfortunately, we seem to have brought the rains with us! It has been a
rainy month, which has kept us in camp. This has given me time to ease my way back into camp life and (of course!) be stressed about my research.

I was a Serena RA (research assistant) a few years
ago, so much of camp life and the research is quite familiar. My ABSOLUTE favorite part about being back is seeing the hyenas I knew when I was
here last time. Many of the cubs are now grown up with their own cubs!!!!

Here are a few of my youngsters from last time that I have seen again!!! I can't wait to get out and see more of them!Born (short for Borneo) was a recently graduated cub when I left. Now he is huge and is working on dispersing!

Snug (short for Silver Nugget) was a little black cub when I left. Now look at her!

Onekama was a young immigrant male with gorgeous spots. Look at those spots!

Now look at him! Those spots are fading...

Seeing my old friends has been wonderful! I can't wait to see more of them in the coming weeks!!!!!!

Monday, March 26, 2018

Hello,
everyone! My name is Connie Rojas and I am one of the graduate students in the
Holekamp lab! It has been a little over two weeks since I arrived in Kenya and
I am feeling a lot of emotions. Fortunate to be here, in the Maasai Mara
National Reserve, observing hyenas, and all of the other cool wildlife! Nervous
about starting my field project since time seems to evaporate and things never
go as planned. Excited to keep receiving my field training! I am getting better
at driving our stick-shift land cruisers in the Mara, identifying hyenas, and
knowing my way (I have no sense of direction). I am sad that my family is so
far away and that they will not get to visit and experience all of what I am experiencing.
Time here is precious, and I will try to get the most out of it!

A little bit
about me. I was born in Los Angeles, CA, grew up in rural, Southern Mexico, and
returned to LA when I was 9 years old. I resided in LA for all of middle school
and high school, and later attended Wellesley College in MA, where I received
my B.A. in Biological Sciences and Psychology. I am a mixture of a cellular
biologist and an ecologist, as most of my courses in undergrad were in
molecular biology, but in my summers, I travelled internationally to conduct
field work. After graduating, I spent close to a year following rhesus macaques
up and down cliffs in Cayo Santiago, PR.I found their behavior and social interactions fascinating, and decided
that for graduate school, I also wanted to study a complex, social species like
these Old World monkeys. And here I am, a 3rd year PhD Student in
Dr. Kay Holekamp’s behavioral ecology lab! Like my training, my research has
both a molecular lab work and a field work component, and now, even a
computational biology/bioinformatics component! Yay! I study host-microbe
interactions, and the ways hyenas and their symbiotic microbes are affecting
each other. I believe microbes are performing critical functions for hyenas; I
just need to characterize them.

I am here in
the Mara for 4 more months for my field season and have 3 exciting projects I
am pursuing. One investigates how microbial communities change across different
stages of meat decomposition, in the savannah! This is such a fun job for
someone who has an irrational fear of all things worm-like, but thankfully, I
am slowly overcoming this fear. Another project involves the collection of
fecal samples from many of the animals here in Mara, not just hyenas, to
explore the forces that structure gut microbial communities in the wild. Is it
diet, is it their host’s evolutionary history, or is it something else? The
last project is my main field project, which evaluates the type of information
hyenas are obtaining from the scent gland secretions of other hyenas. The goal
is to present adult female hyenas with the secretions of two strangers (i.e. an
immigrant male & adult female), and document how long they spend sniffing
each specimen. If hyenas spend a differential amount of time sniffing the samples,
this indicates that scent gland secretions are indeed encoding different
information. I moving to Serena camp and starting this project next month; wish
me luck!

When I am not
going on observations (so fun!!), collecting feces, or “working” on my
dissertation research/data analysis, I am reading (Dee, I borrowed your
‘Walking with the Great Apes’ book but promise to leave it here for Kay),
obsessively posting pictures on my Instagram, and trying to help to the RAs with
whatever they need =) I am having a great time, and looking forward to building
more memories!

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

My name is
Allie and I am the newest RA to Talek Fisi Camp! I graduated from Michigan
State University in 2016 with a degree in Zoology, and I am yet another one of
the RAs who got their start here from BEAM! I studied abroad on the 2014 BEAM
trip, and ever since I’ve been wanting to come back! During my undergrad
experience I volunteered in the hyena lab, working for grad student Julie
Turner on boldness and personality data collection. I loved how interesting and
different the hyenas were, and come graduation I was sad to have to leave the
lab behind.

After
graduation, I spent some time as a primate research intern for the Dian Fossey
Gorilla Fund International, studying gorillas and orangutans and all aspects of
their behavior. Following that I spent a summer helping to conserve the
threatened Utah prairie dog. I never forgot how much I loved the hyenas though,
and here I am again in the field getting the chance to work with them!

I’ve been
in the Mara for about two weeks now, and unfortunately I arrived just in time
for the rainy season. We do not go out on observations when it rains too much
for fear of getting the car stuck in the mud and damaging the beautiful Mara,
so I’ve been biding my time in camp and learning all I can here! That generally
consists of quizzing myself on hyena relatedness and clan membership, but
hopefully soon I’ll be able to get out and start really doing the job I was
sent here for! I’m very excited to begin the year here, and I look forward to
the adventures to come!

Thursday, March 15, 2018

In addition to our beloved hyenas, we see a few other creatures around the grasslands.

A month ago, I witnessed a Martial Eagle defend her recently-killed meal of a White Stork from a pair of Grey Crowned Cranes. I passed the video onto the Maasai Mara Martial Eagle Project, where I learned this behavior is very unusual, and it was likely the cranes had a nest nearby. It is always fun to witness new behaviors, even if they aren't preformed by our hyenas!

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

From some of my recent photos, I have chosen 11 contestants for the Miss/Mr Mara beauty pageant. Lets meet them!

MGTA (Magenta)

Clan: Main Doc

Sex: female

Age: Adult with cubs

RPRT (Rupert)

Clan: KCM

Sex: unk

Age: Subadult

TWST (Twister)

Clan: Main DOC

Sex: Female

Age: adult with cubs

LORD (lord of the dance)

Clan:Main DOC

Sex: male

Age: subadult

EMRA (emerald)

Clan: Main DOC

Sex: male

Age: cub

KESQ

Clan: Main DOC

Sex: male

Age: adult

LGND (Legend)

Clan: Main DOC

Sex: Female

Age: subadult

OTIS

Clan: KCM

Sex: Male

Age: subadult

DOGP (dogpile)

Clan: KCM

Sex: unk

Age: subadult

TC (traverse City)

Clan: Main DOC

Sex: male

Age: adult

Now that weve met the contestants, they will be ranked in three categories. Clarity of spots, uniqueness of pattern (the more unique the spots the easier they are to ID), and overall appearance. They will be ranked out of 5 by each of our 4 judges (Allie, research assistant, Connie, grad student, Maggie, grad student, and myself, research assistant).

The month of December was a tumultuous time for Pond clan.
Around that time Aquamarine (AQUA) took over the clan from Juno and Guava and
(we think) Clementine were both found dead. Another casualty of this period was
Rosalina aka LINA.

LINA before she was injured.

LINA, with her sister Goomba, are Carter’s youngest kids
currently, and she was fat and adorable. However that all changed on December
17th when I found her at the den with the bottom quarter of her left
back leg missing.

First time LINA seen with her injury

How she lost part of her leg we have no idea. She might’ve
lost it from a lion trying to grab her, or from another hyena during AQUA’s
takeover. Whatever the cause, things looked extremely grim for LINA’s chances
of survival and she became very skinny.

Happily though, spotted hyenas are nothing if not tough, and
their ability to survive pretty grievous injuries is well known. For instance,
a few years ago in the Mara conservancy there was an adult female hyena who
survived with both back legs crippled for nearly a year, long enough to
successfully wean her kids. Today while LINA isn’t fully recovered, her wound
has healed up well, she’s gained a little more weight, and is starting to
explore farther out from the den again. The hope is that if she can survive
until the wildebeest come, there will be enough food around to where she might
make a nearly full recovery. (recovery photo pending when I see her again.)

Help Support the Research

You can help support our research by making a donation to the Hyena Research Fund at MSU. Your contributions provide necessary resources for the students and scientists to continue our work. Use the link below to make a donation or contact MSU for additional details.